The goal of this proposal is to develop a transformative low cost, high quality, noninvasive, cellphone-based, optical polarimetric imaging system for point-of-care applications. The specific aims are to design, model, build, and test the system and to develop android based applications for controlling cell phone camera features and perform image processing. This system will utilize a single lens on-chip white light polarized imaging to aid in the diagnosis of several diseases through the detection of variations in the linear states of polarized light as it passes through tissue or blood sample. There are many conditions that induce changes in polarized light and the device is meant to assist medical professionals in the clinic and in low resource settings in the proper diagnosis of these conditions. The initial applications for developing this device include in vivo diagnosis of skin cancers such as basal cell carcinoma (BCC), melanoma, and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and in vitro detection of malaria in the lab or in the field.
